Early in the days of the web, when the internet was turning into a mass medium with possibilities for mixing images and sound, a file format known as the GIF was used to create miniature animations on web pages.

This was in the pre-YouTube days, when video really wasn't part of the online experience. Back in the 1990s, the animated GIF (for Graphics Interchange Format) was an ad-hoc way to bring movement to static websites. By combining several frames in a single image file, a web page could display a brief animation without taking up a lot of storage space and bandwidth. The results were predictably awful and annoying: globes spinning for no apparent reason, waving flags and blinking yellow "under construction" signs.

The animated GIF largely faded from view, but over the past several years, it's made a comeback. Pointlessly flashing GIFs are gone, replaced by far more sophisticated images, often using frames from photographs or videos and displaying sly humor and artistic flair. Art galleries are devoting shows to animated GIFs, bloggers post them in an attempt to go viral and a new generation of apps is making it possible to create animated GIFs right from your phone.

Animated GIFs, once derided, have become very, very cool.

Think of this as Nostalgia 2.0. Instead of reaching back to pre-digital technologies (the 78 rpm record, the dial telephone), this is a fascination with technologies from the not-so-distant -- and decidedly -- digital past.

Yes, we're now at the point where computing technologies can attain the sort of retro status previously reserved for out-of-date gadgets like a manual typewriter or a transistor radio.

Consider an app on my iPhone called Pixel Face. The app lets you snap an image and transform it into something resembling a graphic from an early computer game.

These images have a pixelated look -- that is, they're composed of big, square individual pixels. Today's graphics have pixels, too, but there are so many, they all blend together; Pixel Face returns you to the days when computer displays couldn't present as much graphic information and you actually saw the pixels. "Imagine you and your friends are all in an old-fashioned computer game," says the website for the app.

There's no real reason to use this app other than to experience a blast from the past. It's retro chic, and it's digital, too.

An entirely different type of computer program, WriteRoom (available for $9.99 at the Mac App Store), gives you the black screen, green text and blinking cursor from 1980s-era computers.

Before color displays were affordable, that was all you got, and now it's being resurrected as a distraction-free writing tool. It's an antidote to today's cluttered word processors, no doubt, and a comforting return to simpler times. If you don't like the green and black, you can adjust the settings to have a less jarring look to your text.

One of the more unusual uses of earlier technologies is an iPhone app called InstaCRT. After snapping a photo, your image is transmitted to a studio in Stockholm, Sweden, where it is projected on an older type of display called a CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor. A camera in the studio snaps an image of your photo on the CRT, and then relays it back to you on your iPhone. The end result? A one-of-a-kind, CRT-looking version of the image likely to cause diehard geeks to have fuzzy feelings for earlier generations of computer displays.

And then there's the animated GIF. With smart phone apps such as GifBoom (for both iPhone and Android), you can now create and share GIF animations right on your phone.

PBS recently produced a wonderful short documentary, "Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium" (available on YouTube), exploring the history of the medium and how it's now being used to create wildly inventive visual experiences.

The GIF is old technology, it's digital and it's already making a comeback.